Wilhelmina, though, subverts the trope because her villainy is based on the fact that she is trying to reclaim a position that should have been hers in the first place.
Is it really villainy if she is fighting institutional oppression the entire time? Wilhelmina approaches every situation with an unshakable amount of confidence. Sometimes her confidence compromises the few close relationships in her life — Marc, Nico, her lover Connor — but she shows love to these people through unwavering loyalty.
Most of all, she moves through the series knowing what she wants and constantly taking action. Trans women are some of the most interesting and ambitious people on the planet and we deserve characters who are transcendent.
Why settle for Alexis when we can have Wilhelmina? Cass is a writer, musician, and educator who lives in NYC. Instagram: cass. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.
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Like this: Like Loading Published by Cass Ball. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Follow Following. The Niche Join other followers. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. During the season 3 finale, she discovers Claire Meade had an illegitimate child with Cal Hartley and plans to use this information to force Claire to step out of her sudden position of power.
However, Claire artfully fixes the situation for herself and confesses everything to Cal first, including how Wilhelmina used the information for attempted blackmail. As a result, Wilhelmina goes back to being under heavy suspicion with the company. At the end of the finale, she is seen hiring a manhunter to track down Connor, stating she feels the only way she can keep her position in the company is to find Connor After the manhunter leaves, she is seen walking into a room, and upon seeing someone, drops her shot glass, obviously shocked at this mystery person's appearance.
In the season 4 premiere however, we found out that it was her daughter Nico, who was covered in blood as she had just killed her boyfriend. In Plus None we find out that Nico didn't really kill her boyfriend, she is just trying to extort money from Wilhelmina, with her boyfriend posing as a private investigator blackmailing the Slaters.
In desperation, Wilhelmina planned to flee the country with Nico, and resigned from her position at MODE effective after the upcoming "Fearless shoot" in the Bahamas. However, Marc later overheard Nico and her boyfriend scheming, and after intitally refusing to believe him, Wilhelmina set a trap for Nico by showing her an expensive family heirloom that they could use to pay off the blackmailer.
Nico took the bait, and was caught red-handed and confessed to everything. Wilhelmina later learned from Claire Meade that Connor had been found dead in Panama, and having lost everything, Wilhelmina broke down in tears.
After Marc demanded a vacation, Wilhelmina forced Betty into becoming her assistant on the Bahama's trip, but after learning that her rival had taken a job she desired, Wilhelmina momentarily gave up, and began eating cheeseburgers on a private beach, only to be approached by Connor, alive and well.
The pair shared a romantic trip together, and planned to escape together, but moments before their boat arrived, the police arrived having received a tip off that Connor was at the hotel, and realising he had been caught, he insisted that Wilhelmina pretend that she had been the one to turn him in, in order to get her position back at MODE, which she did.
Wilhelmina is the daughter of a United States senator, a hard man who is never satisfied with his daughter's achievements. She never addresses him as "father" or "dad" but instead as "The Senator. She also has a strong-willed teenage daughter, Nico, introduced in the episode "The Lyin', the Watch and the Wardrobe" who has attended a succession of boarding schools and rarely lived with her mother. The name and identity of Nico's father and the length and details of his marriage or romantic involvement with Wilhelmina has never been addressed, but in Nico's first appearance it was mentioned he currently lives in Dubai, implying he is probably extremely wealthy from oil interests.
It is also implied her father knows of and financially supports Nico but, like Wilhelmina, takes little active interest in his daughter's day-to-day life. Despite their differences, Wilhelmina has shown willingness to improve their relationship, such as cooking a traditional Thanksgiving meal when Nico unexpectedly visited during the holidays, only to learn Nico had made other plans, in one of Wilhelmina's few sympathetic moments. Nico returned after she was suspected of murdering her boyfriend, but was actually hatching a scheme with her boyfriend, who was posing as a detective, to extort money from her mother.
Because she has a hostile womb, she bribed the seamstress Christina McKinney played by Ashley Jensen , into being her surrogate. Wilhelmina implies Renee's birth name is "Rhonda.
The Slaters' first names are based on real names from the world of modeling: The Wilhelmina character is named after the legendary supermodel, who worked with Gia Marie Carangi before her death, and modeling agency of the same name, while the Nico character is named for the famous Warhol superstar icon.
Much of Wilhelmina's sophisticated wardrobe revolves around the colors white, silver, gold, and brown in the first two seasons. In a deleted scene from the season 1 DVD, Wilhelmina is seen looking at her closet full of outfits as she tries to rearrange them by the aforementioned colors. In one episode, Wilhelmina is referred to as "A Chanel suit with an office. She is often seen wearing fur. In an episode where she needs to come up with money for a photographer by selling out of her wardrobe, lynx, sable, chinchilla, and mink are shown amongst her wardrobe.
Originally, Wilhelmina was supposed to be so mean she would fire an assistant every week, but Marc proved to be a popular character and got the job permanently. Among the people Wilhelmina uses in her scheming besides Marc and Christina despite having mixed feelings about the latter because of Christina's friendship with Betty are:.
If Christina and her husband had sexual intercourse at the time of William's conception, a will be required to determine who William's parents are.
Betty persuades Wilhelmina to tell the truth, which she does not only publicly, but also secretly to , who demands Wilhelmina keep her share of Meade before he will invest in the company. Ugly Betty Wiki Explore. James Amanda Tanen. Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4. Sonya IntrepidBequest. Help desk Watercooler. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Wilhelmina Slater. We see Justin Suarez Mark Indelicato discover his sexual orientation and understand himself over the course of the show.
While he is constantly bullied in school for his likes towards broadway theatre and fashion, his family continues to support him all the time and encourage him to be true to himself.
Unlike Marc St. James's Michael Urie mother who walks out on him for being gay , the Suarez family decides to celebrate Justin coming out in order to show their support.
The situation definitely reflects on how more people are accepting of homosexuality than earlier. Betty wore braces and glasses, she was not skinny and style-conscious like most people working at Mode, but these things definitely do not make her ugly. When the show ended, the ugly part of the title fades away leaving only Betty on the screen showing how she is not ugly anymore because of the change in her looks. With beauty being a very subjective concept, describing Betty as ugly is definitely something that audiences today will not appreciate.
Betty constantly talked about body positivity and was not happy with the idea of using only skinny models in the magazine and fashion shows. In one instance, she encourages Daniel Meade Eric Mabius to hire healthy models which he agrees to it. However, when the same issue is brought up to Wilhelmina, she points out that designers prefer skinny models so that the focus is on the clothes and not the models. Until today, we continue to see skinny models on runways for the same reason.
Wilhelmina tricks Daniel into thinking that a designer specifically requested that Daniel models for their show. Excited about it, he agrees to it and starts preparing for it.
He is then constantly reminded of how he is too old to be modeling until he looks at his own reflection and realizes that he is not young enough for it. Models like Lou Kenny who walked the runway when she was 58 and Joani Johnson who was part of Rihanna's Fenty campaign at 67 show how the fashion industry has changed its perspective on older models.
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